Sakharov Demands Public Trail on His Banishment

Soviet dissident leader Andrel Sakharov, who was sent into internal exile last month, called for a public trial yesterday, saying it was the only way a "just state can determine measures and form of punishment" for his alleged crimes.

The 58-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner, in a statement released by his wife at a press conference at their Moscow apartment, said he had refused to accept a formal decision stripping him of the right to live in Moscow.

The KGB, the Soviet Union's secret police, exiled Sakharov to the closed city of Gorki, about 250 miles east of here, on Jan. 22. At the time, they took away his internal passport, Ostensibly to issue him temporary permission to live in Gorki. When the passport was returned, his right to live in Moscow had been cancelled and residence in Gorki made permanent.

Elena Bonner, Sakharov's wife, said he refused to accept the altered passport and sent it to the Moscow prosecutor demanding a legal explanation.

The famous physicist, who helped develop the Soviet nuclear bomb, was banished and deprived of all state honors for allegedly slandering the Soviet state and betraying military secrets to Western agents. Sakharov has rejected the charges as baseless.

Bonner said yesterday that the scientific mail to which Sakharov is entitled as a member of the Academy of Sciences has been cut off and he has not received an invitation to attend a March 4-6 general membership meeting of the academy. She said these actions have intensified the isolation and administrative barriers surrounding her husband.